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Explore the clash between utopian ideals and neoliberal principles, focusing on the concept of the minimal state as advocated by philosophers like Robert Nozick and Friedrich Hayek. Is the minimal state a utopia or a pragmatic solution? Delve into the ethical implications and societal impact of embracing or rejecting utopian visions in governance.
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The Pursuit of the IdealPart 1: Utopianism and neoliberalismPart 2: Utopianism as a source of good or evil?http://folk.uio.no/daget/utopia09.ppt Guest lecture, STV 4119, November 20 2009.Dag Einar Thorsen d.e.thorsen@stv.uio.no
Nozick’s defence of the minimal state ”Our main conclusions about the state are that a minimal state, limited to the functions of protection against force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contracts, and so on, is justified; that any more extensive state will violate persons’ rights not to be forced to do certain things, and is unjustified; and that the minimal state is inspiring as well as right. Two noteworthy implications are that the state may not use its coercive apparatus for the purpose of getting some citizens to aid others, or in order to prohibit activities to people for their own good or protection.” (Nozick 1974:ix, first emphasis added)
Friedrich Hayek [We must] offer a new liberal programme which appeals to the imagination. We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage. What we lack is a liberal Utopia, a programme which seems neither a mere defence of things as they are nor a diluted kind of socialism, but a truly liberal radicalism which does not spare the susceptibilities of the mighty (…) which is not too severely practical, and which does not confine itself to what appears today to be practically possible. (Hayek 1949:26, quoted by Booth 2006:3)
The minimal state is no Utopia… ”No state more extensive that the minimal state can be justified. But doesn’t the idea, or ideal, of the minimal state lack luster? Can it thrill the heart or inspire people to struggle or sacrifice? Would anyone man barricades under its banner? (…) Whatever its virtues, it appears clear that the minimal state is no utopia.” (Nozick 1974:297)
…but it may be the best world imaginable ”The totality of conditions we would wish to impose on societies which are (preeminently) to qualify as utopias, taken jointly, are inconsistent. That it is impossible simultaneously and continually to realize all social and political goods is a regrettable fact about the human condition, worth investigating and bemoaning. Our subject here, however, is the best of all possible worlds. (…) Utopia, though, must be, in some restricted sense, the best for all of us; the best world imaginable, for each of us.” (Nozick 1974:297-298)
Applied utopia ”in our actual world, what corresponds to the model of possible worlds is a wide and diverse range of communities which people can enter if they are admitted, leave if they wish to, shape according to their wishes; a society in which utopian experimentation can be tried, different styles of life can be lived, and alternative visions of the good can be individually and jointly pursued.” (Nozick 1974:307)
A world of voluntary associations ”The conclusion to draw is that there will be not one kind of community existing and one kind of life led in utopia. Utopia will consist of utopias, of many different and divergent communities in which people lead different kinds of lives under different institutions. Some kinds of communities will be more attractive to most than others; communities will wax and wane. People will leave some for others or spend their whole life in one. Utopia is a framework for utopias, a place where people are at liberty to join together voluntarily to pursue and attempt to realize their own vision of the good life in the ideal community but where no one can impose his own utopian vision upon others.” (Nozick 1974:312)
The minimal state as Utopia ”The framework for utopia that we have described is equivalent to the minimal state. (…) The minimal state treats us as inviolate individuals, who may not be used in certain ways by others as means or tools or instruments or resources; it treats us as persons having individual rights with the dignity it constitutes. Treating us with respect by respecting our rights, it allows u, individually or with whom we choose, to choose our life and to realize our ends and our conception of ourselves, insofar as we can, aided by voluntary cooperation of other individuals possessing the same dignity. How dare any state or group of individuals do more. Or less.” (Nozick 1974:333-334)
Anders Fogh Rasmussen Socialstaten giver en falsk social tryghed, hvor vi som hunden kan ligge og lune os foran kaminilden. (...) Vi er reduceret til tæmmede og lydige sociale dyr. Vi skal genindsætte mennesket i dets værdighed ved at give det mere frihed og personligt ansvar. Socialstatens grænser skal rykkes tilbage, det frie markeds grænser skal rykkes frem. Frem for alt skal kunst og kultur sprudle som kilde til stadig fornyelse og blomstring i samfundet. (Fogh Rasmussen 1993:8)
Summary, and two final questions • The minimal state is the only form of government which is morally acceptable, according to Nozick. • Governments which try to do more than the minimal state will inevitably infringe on the natural rights of some people, and is not morally acceptable. • But anarchy, in which people are free to rob and defraud one another, is not acceptable either. • The best possible world consists of a minimal state, concerned only with the enforcement of private property rights, and where voluntary associations take care of all other needs for collective action individuals may have. • But is it true that a minimal state will be the best of all possible worlds? Is it not exceedingly naive to believe that the minimal state will lead to anything but the enslavement of most people?
Definitions of Utopia „Die utopischen Modelle im hier gemeinten Sinn werden – im Gegensatz zu der Tradition des politischen Denkens von Aristoteles über Hobbes und Locke bis hin zu Rousseau, Kant und Carl Schmitt – als Fiktionen funktionierender Gesamtgesellschaften vorgestellt und geschildert. Als konkrete Beschreibungen bester oder schlechtester Sozietäten stehen sie unter dem Zwang, von den politiktheoretische und sozialphilosophische Reflexionen weitgehend entlastet sind: Sie müssen bis ins Detail des Alltagslebens aufzeigen, wie die Mechanismen der gewünschten oder gefürchteten Gesellschaft aussehen und welche Praxis der in ihr lebenden Menschen aus ihr folgt.“ (Saage 1997:2; cf. Kumar 1987:25, who unlike Saage separates between Utopia and “anti-utopia” or dystopia)
“Utopia, then, is first and foremost a work of imaginative fiction in which, unlike other such works, the central subject is the good society. This distinguishes it at the same time from other treatments of the good society, whether in myths of a Golden Age, beliefs in a coming millennium, or philosophical speculation on the ideal city. Fictive elements no doubt have their part to play in these modes but in none of them is narrative fiction, as in the utopia, the defining form” (Kumar 1991:27) “What, then, is the essence of utopianism? In contrast to Berlin and Kolakowski, I take the defining feature of utopian thought to be the vivid imagination of the norms, institutions, and individual relationships of a society meant to be regarded as qualitatively better in at least certain respects than that in which its originator lives” (Davis 2001:76-7).
The most dangerous belief “One belief, more than any other, is responsible for the slaughter of individuals on the altars of the great historical ideals – justice or progress or the happiness of future generations, or the sacred mission or emancipation of a nation or race or class, or even liberty itself, which demands the sacrifice of individuals for the freedom of society. This is the belief that somewhere in the past or in the future, in divine revelation or in the mind of an individual thinker, in the pronouncements of history or science, or in the simple heart of an uncorrupted good man, there is a final solution.” (Berlin 2002:212)
“This ancient faith rests on the conviction that all the positive values in which men have believed must, in the end, be compatible, and perhaps even entail one another. ‘Nature binds truth, happiness and virtue together by an indissoluble chain,’ said one of the best men who ever lived [i.e. the Marquis de Condorcet], and spoke in similar terms of liberty, equality and justice. But is this true? It is a commonplace that neither political equality nor efficient organisation nor social justice is compatible with more than a modicum of individual liberty, and certainly not with unrestricted laissez-faire; that justice and generosity, public and private loyalties, the demands of genius and the claims of society can conflict violently with each other. And it is no great way from that to the generalisation that not all good things are compatible, still less all the ideals of mankind. […] To admit that the fulfilment of some of our ideals may in principle make the fulfilment of others impossible is to say that the notion of total human fulfilment is a formal contradiction, a metaphysical chimera.” (Berlin 2002:212; se også Condorcet [1793] 1971).
“So I conclude that the very notion of a final solution is not only impracticable but, if I am right, and some values cannot but clash, incoherent also. The possibility of a final solution – even if we forget the terrible sense that these words acquired in Hitler’s day, turns out to be an illusion; and a very dangerous one. For if one really believes that such a solution is possible, then surely no cost would be too high to obtain it: to make mankind just and happy and creative and harmonious for ever – what could be too high a price to pay for that? To make such an omelette, there is surely no limit to the number of eggs that should be broken – that was the faith of Lenin, of Trotsky, of Mao, and for all I know of Pol Pot.” (Berlin 1990:15).
“Since I know the only true path to the ultimate solution of the problems of society, I know which way to drive the human caravan; and since you are ignorant of what I know, you cannot be allowed to have liberty of choice even within the narrowest limits, if the goal is to be reached. You declare that a given policy will make you happier, or freer, or give you room to breathe; but I know that you are mistaken, I know what you need, what all men need; and if there is resistance based on ignorance or malevolence, then it must be broken and hundreds of thousands may have to perish to make millions happy for all time. What choice have we, who have the knowledge, but to be willing to sacrifice them all?” (Berlin 1990:15).
“Pluralism, with the measure of ‘negative’ liberty that it entails, seems to me a truer and more humane ideal than the goals of those who seek in the great disciplined, authoritarian structures the ideal of ‘positive’ self-mastery by classes, or peoples, or the whole of mankind. It is truer, because it does, at least, recognise the fact that human goals are many, not all of them commensurable, and in perpetual rivalry with one another. […] To say that in some ultimate, all-reconciling yet realisable synthesis duty is interest, or individual freedom is pure democracy or an authoritarian State, is to throw a metaphysical blanket over self-deceit or deliberate hypocrisy. It is more humane because it does not (as the system-builders do) deprive men, in the name of some remote, or incoherent, ideal, of much that they have found to be indispensable to their life as unpredictably self-transforming human beings. In the end men choose between ultimate values; they choose as they do because their life and thought are determined by fundamental moral categories and concepts that are, at any rate over large stretches of time and space, and whatever their ultimate origins, a part of their being and thought and sense of their own identity; part of what makes them human” (Berlin 2002: 216).
“Of course social and political collisions will take place; the mere conflict of positive values alone makes this unavoidable. Yet they can, I believe, be minimised by promoting and preserving an uneasy equilibrium, which is constantly threatened and in constant need of repair – that alone, I repeat, is the precondition for decent societies and morally acceptable behaviour, otherwise we are bound to lose our way. A little dull as a solution, you will say? Not the stuff of which calls to heroic action by inspired leaders are made? Yet if there is some truth in this view, perhaps that is sufficient” (Berlin: 1990:19).
Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, prince de Bénévent Surtout, Messieurs, point de zèle!
“[W]e cannot sacrifice either freedom or the organisation needed for its defence or a minimum standard of welfare. The way out must therefore lie in some logically untidy, flexible and even ambiguous compromise. Every situation calls for its own specific policy, since ‘out of the crooked timber of humanity’, as Kant once remarked, ‘no straight thing was ever made’. What the age calls for is not (as we are so often told) more faith, or stronger leadership, or more scientific organisation. […] What is required is a less mechanical, less fanatical application of general principles, however rational or righteous, a more cautious and less arrogantly self-confident application of accepted, scientifically tested, general solutions to unexamined individual cases. The wicked Talleyrand’s ‘Surtout, Messieurs, point de zèle’ can be more humane than the demand for uniformity of the virtuous Robespierre, and a salutary brake upon too much control of men’s lives in an age of social planning and technology.” (Berlin 2002:92)
Helmut Schmidt Wer Visionen hat, sollte zum Arzt gehen. Das Schneckentempo ist das normale Tempo jeder Demokratie.
A free summary:Democracy as anti-utopia • Utopias may be inspiring, but also inherently dangerous. • This is so because any utopia has to be implemented against the will of those who wish another kind of society, be it alternative utopias or just the maintenance of the status quo. • Any political system has to balance different conflicting values, and arbitrate between social and political conflicts if it is to become a peaceful and lasting arrangement. • Democracy is an inherently conservative and often frustrating form of government, but may prove to be the only form of government which could lead to domestic tranquillity and a generous measure of personal freedom for everyone. • It is not the best world imaginable, but may be the best world we could build here on Earth, or any world populated by inherently fallible and merely partially rational human beings.
Berlin, Isaiah (1990): The Crooked Timber of Humanity. Edited by Henry Hardy. London: John Murray. Berlin, Isaiah (2000): The Power of Ideas. Edited by Henry Hardy. London: Chatto & Windus. Berlin, Isaiah (2002): Liberty: Incorporating Four Essays on Liberty. Edited by Henry Hardy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Booth, Philip (ed.) (2006): Towards a Liberal Utopia? London: Continuum/Institute of Economic Affairs. Condorcet, Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de ([1793] 1971): Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progres de l'esprit humain. Préface et notes par Monique et François Hincker.Paris: Editions Sociales. Davis, Laurence (2001): “Isaiah Berlin, William Morris, and the Politics of Utopia”; pp. 56-86 in Barbara Goodwin (ed.): The Philosophy of Utopia. London: Frank Cass. Fogh Rasmussen, Anders (1993): Fra socialstat til minimalstat – En liberal strategi. Copenhagen: Samleren Hayek, Friedrich (1949/1998): The Intellectuals and Socialism. London: Institute for Economic Affairs. Kumar, Krishan (1987): Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times. Oxford: Blackwell. Kumar, Krishan (1991): Utopianism. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Nozick, Robert (1974): Anarchy, State and Utopia. Oxford: Blackwell. Saage, Richard (1997): Utopieforschung. Eine Bilanz. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.
